The Littlest Things
by TheLoverOfBooks
Summary: Frederick Chase hated the littlest things about his past actions and missed the littlest things about his daughter, and it was during the littlest moments that he would let his sorrow and regret overtake him... A short story regarding Frederick's regrets about how he raised his daughter, Annabeth. T because it deals with child abuse/neglect.


Frederick Chase hated the littlest things about his past actions and missed the littlest things about his daughter, and it was during the littlest moments that he would let his sorrow and regret overtake him. He would be away from everything, in his car driving to work, and his emotions would hit him suddenly. Always he tried to repress them, and he never allowed his wife to see, but his attempts were fruitless, the guilt and agony striking him frequently and evoking an aching feeling of remorse in his soul.

The first of the actions that he would remember were the worst, those that tore him apart when he recalled them. He couldn't understand that younger person he had been, too influenced by his wife and distracted by his work to pay any attention to the girl who only asked for what should have been expected from him as a father: his love.

He remembered when she arrived at his doorstep and he begged Athena to take her back.

He remembered when she cried and cried and cried and he was ready to throw her off of the roof of his apartment building.

He remembered when she turned three and he put her in a full-day preschool program just to get rid of her.

He remembered when he got engaged to her stepmother, and she just looked at him like he was crazy.

He remembered when they announced that they were having kids, twins, and Annabeth locked herself in her room for the day.

He remembered that morning when she woke up crying, eyes bloodshot, head feverish, skin clammy and nose runny, and he was so caught up in his work that he practically shoved her out the door and onto that yellow monster of the school bus when she tried to resist, screaming and hiccupping. He remembered the intensity of her gaze on him as she looked out the cloudy window right before it departed, miserable and full of loathing.

He remembered when one of the twins caught whatever flu she had had and both he and his wife blamed her, and she was so ill that all she could do was cry and nod and hang her head in half-hearted shame so she wouldn't make them angrier.

He remembered the birthday that he and his wife had forgotten, when Annabeth brought it up disappointedly before bedtime and Frederick just shrugged flippantly and said "There's always Christmas."

He remembered when that first monster attacked her and Frederick managed to kill it, saving her, but then proceeded to yell at her for trying to use his computer and waking up her (_half-_) brothers.

He remembered when the monsters just kept attacking, and she had to learn to fight for herself to some degree. It was when one of them dug its claws into her skin, drawing a large amount of blood, and her stepmother regarded it as "just a scratch." It was when Annabeth found her father's stash of nectar and cleaned her wound out herself.

He remembered when all of those spiders crawled over her while she was trying to sleep, her heart pounding furiously in her chest, and her stepmother didn't believe her and they wouldn't go away and they were suffocating her and all she could do was lie there and choke back sobs. He remembered when she came to him hysterical the next afternoon when she got home from school, begging him to stay home from work and help her, and he disregarded her concern as folly and left.

He remembered the day before she disappeared from his home, when her icy gray eyes looked into his and she yelled "I hate you, Frederick Chase!" and she meant it, and he knew it.

He'd realized then, to some extent, the horrors of his actions, though they were fogged by the shallow depth of his young mind. He vowed he would try to make things better, try to make things right in some way.

The next morning, she was gone, having run away and left only a simple note:

_I'm leaving, now. –Annabeth_

Her penmanship was neat and pretty perfect, even as a seven year old.

He didn't get a chance to try and fulfill his vow.

He couldn't even do anything to get her back, not without alerting the authorities and getting himself arrested and probably jailed for life, even though he definitely deserved that punishment or worse… after all, he had caused a seven year old to run away from home. That's pretty difficult to achieve. Looking back on it, how had he ever let her just walk out of the door? How hadn't he noticed? How cruel had he had and his wife been to drive her out of there?

He tried to search for over a month, and he only stopped when his wife scolded him and told him that it was pointless. It seemed she also showed some remorse over the fact that the girl had run away, but its extent was nothing compared to that of his.

He scoured the newspaper every day for some note that might let him know that she was okay until he finally received a message telling him that she was, and that she had arrived at a camp for demigods where she could stay.

It killed him, what he'd done. Not so much at first, but over time it became unbearable.

It killed him when he saw little girls with blonde curly hair or bright gray eyes, or heard the names "Anna" or "Beth."

It killed him when he watched Bobby and Matthew grow up, and he would remember something small about Annabeth that would make him smile, and then laugh, and then want to cry.

It killed him when they would progress, taking their first steps and speaking to him in their childish babble, and Frederick would realize he didn't even remember Annabeth's first word.

It killed him when he watched his wife's warmth towards them and remembered her hostility towards his daughter… and his resulting negative attitude towards her as well.

It killed him when one of his sons would do something stupid, like break one of his wife's good glasses, and he would let it fly by him, something he most certainly didn't do with Annabeth.

It killed him when he remembered that, against all odds, the girl had traveled across the country to reach Camp Half Blood in New York. She had help, of course, but it was almost frightening to him that she had such innately developed survival skills already.

It killed him when he remembered the things he had said to her, or done to her, and realized exactly why she had run away… and he didn't blame her for wanting to do so either.

Annabeth came back to him, eventually, and he and his wife fought for a while beforehand. He drilled it into her head that if she did anything to be cruel to his daughter, that he would leave her. She knew he was serious, and it was a combination of her guilt and his threat that caused her to see her wrong-doing and change her ways.

It still wasn't easy, and Annabeth held a definite grudge against the two of them. With time, though, it lessened, and he finally began to understand his daughter and what she had become. She was beautiful, and she was a gift, and he would never stop feeling guilty for what he had done to her as a child. She allowed him to have a portion of herself, and he could only imagine how difficult that was for her to do. She hardly, if ever, spoke to him of her bad childhood memories, because she could see the guilt and pain in his eyes every day when he looked at her.

He couldn't ever make up for his wrongdoings, but he could try, and try he did. He worked every day to do right by the girl who deserved everything from him, and when she threw her arms around him on Mount Tam, gazing up at him with those awestruck, adoring eyes, he knew he was off to a decent start.

She was the best gift that he had ever received, and though it killed him to remember how he had neglected her and he knew that they'd lost much of what they could have had as a family, he knew that he loved her, and, by some miracle, she loved him back.

And in the end, that was all that mattered.

**(A/N: And yet another angst fic emerges from my mind! Actually, I'd begun this a while ago and I was inspired to finish it yesterday... and so I did. I actually like how this came out, even if it's sad. Annabeth's childhood neglect is something that is mentioned various times throughout the novel, but it was never directly touched upon until Mark of Athena, when Annabeth describes her spider experience. The fact that she went through so much as such a young child is so often overlooked by people, and I feel like it says so much about her character. It explains a lot about her personality, especially her flaws. **

**Anyway, thank you so much for reading, as always! Please drop a review with your thoughts if possible, they always make my day and I could always use constructive criticism! I hope all of you northeasterners like me are safe from Sandy, and I pray for everyone who suffered damages and losses because of it. Having experienced a power outage and loss of heat all week, I only experienced the half of it. I cannot begin to fathom what it was like for those who lived in coastal regions that were flooded. **

**Keep hope, everyone! ****Thanks for reading, stay awesome!)**


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